We’re doing some work with Porto Cupecoy, a luxury ‘marina village’ resort on St. Martin in the Caribbean. Well, technically it’s on Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the island.
In 140 characters or less on Twitter tell us why you really need a week in the lap of luxury at the Porto Cupecoy luxury resort and marina village on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean. Be sure to start your tweet with ” Dear @pcupecoy” so we can find it.
Don’t tweet? If you tell us on your blog why you need a Porto Cupecoy vacation (just include a link to http://www.portocupecoy.com and we’ll find you) you’ll be entered into the draw too. You can both blog and tweet for two chances to win!
Prize
The prize includes:
Round trip airfare for two from US, Canada, or Caribbean (up to $2000)
One week accommodation for two at Porto Cupecoy during 2010
One water sports activity to be coordinated through Porto Cupecoy (up to $250)
Porto Cupecoy is on Facebook and Twitter, if you’re so inclined.
PopVox is the people’s choice awards held during Vancouver Digital Week. The PopVox Awards recognizes all major sectors of the digital media industry and celebrates its creativity, talent, and achievements. Creators submit their projects and the people vote online for their favorites.
We’re submitting in the ‘Best Do-Gooder’ category, talking about our work to help save the Great Bear Rainforest. I recorded a quick YouTube video for our submission, in which I woefully mispronounce the word ‘tract’:
While you’re at it, you could also vote for PhoneGap (a client) and friends of Capulet, Giant Ant Media. If you’ve got other favourites, feel free to post them in the comments.
Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:
The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.
I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?
In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.
As you may know, one of our clients over at Capulet is DeSmogBlog, a website dedicated to “to clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate change”.
As part of our ongoing online marketing activities for them, we launched a little contest on Flickr: the Greenest Photo Ever Contest:
The challenge is simple: take the greenest photo ever.
What does that mean? Whatever you want it to.
It can be literally a really green photo (but not of a green dress, that’s cruel). Or it can be a metaphorically green photo, whether that’s ecological or ‘green with envy’ or any other angle you can think of. In short, be creative!
In order to participate, you need a Flickr account (they’re free). Then just join the contest group, and submit a photo. You can use an existing photo from your Flickr photostream or take a new one. Complete rules and so forth are on the group page.
Our group looks pretty sad at the moment, with its two little photos (and one of them is mine, which doesn’t really qualify, does it?). We’ve just launched, but I’d like to achieve some kind of happy critical mass as soon as possible. So go forth and submit.
The folks from Fanscape contacted with an offer of some free tickets to The Fray, a rock band from Denver. This is the only song of theirs I know–they sound Coldplayesque.
I’ve got two pairs of general admission tickets for their show at Deer Lake Park on July 29th. I’m supposed to say that the tickets are on behalf of NowWhat, where there’s apparently a schwack of behind-the scenes videos, tour photos and so forth.
I tried to think of a good contest for this giveaway (assuming there’s, you know, more than two fans of The Fray among my dear readers). I couldn’t, so this is my lame contest:
What English Premiership football (that is, soccer) team do I support?
I figured that was fair because regular readers might know, but the judicious searcher can find out.
The first two correct answers win the tickets. One answer per human, please.
UPDATE: We have two correct answers. Congratulations to Aimee and Matthew who correctly identified Liverpool as my football team of choice. They shall never walk alone, and they each get a pair of tickets to The Fray.
We’re planning on running one for a client, and we’re thinking of just hosting the thing in a Flickr group. Contestants will add photos to the group to enter the contest.
We were thinking that we’d enable the community to choose the finalists and then have our client pick the winner. I was thinking that we could select the five or ten finalists based on the number of times a photo had been ‘favourited’ (Flickr users can ‘favourite’ photos to give a photo a sort of thumbs-up, and to bookmark it on their Favourites page).
Do you see any flaws in that plan? Here’s one. Users will have to either take new photos, or upload old ones again, because existing Flickr photos may already have accrued some favourites. Do you think that’s a problem?
Flickr does track when people favourite a photo (here’s an example). However, that’s a lot of manual pain on our end in counting the number of favourites during the period of the contest. And it could be confusing for other users if a photo newly added to the group has, like, 15 favourites.
I thought I’d crowd-source this problem to see if anybody had another idea. I’ve also posted to the Flickr forum to see what they think over there.
One of our clients is a global warming blog. We do sundry online marketing activities for them, and we’re planning an online photography contest on the site.
We’re looking for a kick-ass prize for the winning submission. We’re exploring some options, but I figured I’d post here and see if anybody had something to offer. Ideally the prize would:
Be worth at least CAN $500. It can be cash, but it doesn’t have to be.
Appeal to a broad audience. Or at least to your average Flickr user.
Not be geography-specific.
Not be from a company who’s trying to greenwash their organization. ExxonMobil need not apply.
Benefits to the donor company include:
Associating your company with a particularly popular cause
Brand exposure to all those tasty online influencer types
Link love from the photo contest site, and possibly from sites that link to the contest
Sweet, sweet karma
If you are, belong to or know of such a company, feel free to drop me a line.
We’re doing a little work with Canada Place, the big sail barge (not that sail barge) on Burrard Inlet in downtown Vancouver. They’re running a contest to make a video about “the Canadian Experience”:
Three finalists will be selected and the winning submission will win a trip for two to Vancouver, two nights hotel accommodation and $500 in spending money. Video submissions must be no longer than 60 seconds and should make sense with or without sound.
It’s time to put on your thinking toque and get filming. The more outrageous the better! Just remember to keep it safe and clean.
What about those of you already in Lotusland? Vancouverites get a long weekend in the city at the Pan Pacific Hotel, car rental and gas for the weekend. They receive three nights accommodation, and $100 gift certificates for two different restaurants (Carderos and Glowbal).
They made this little sample video which, forgive me, looks decidedly beatable:
The contest closes next Tuesday, June 19, so think Soderbergh, not Kubrick. And sorry all you lovely foreign readers, the contest is only open to Canadians. What’re you going to do, eh?
UPDATE: Hey, BlogTV.ca! Because you only permit traffic from Canadian IP addresses, I can’t access your site to contact you. I may, in fact, want to give you some money. I’ll investigate some anonymizing strategies, but in the meantime, drop me a line if you notice this.
Anyhow, the top video on the site made me totally LOL a couple of times:
I also hadn’t been to Super Deluxe before, apparently “the premier site for comedy videos”. No time to check other videos out right now, but they’re one-for-one for me. Plus, I really like how their embedded videos work.
We just watched the 24 finalists perform in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest at the local public house. We’re currently in the 15-minute voting period, after which (I gather) each country’s voting pattern will be announced, and eventually a winner will be crowned.
In the meantime, allow me to pick whole I think will win. I wonder, are any of these videos up on YouTube yet? Hmm…not yet, YouTube appears to have blocked all Eurovision-related submissions for today.
Anyhow, I’m going with:
Russia
Hungary
Finland
Hungary deserves to win, I think, but it’s hard to beat three hot Russian girls all tarted up and singing dirty lyrics.
I must find a video for the Ukrainian entry. If defies description, and expresses everything that I find so deeply surreal about this whole event.
UPDATE: I have located the Ukrainian entry. This isn’t from the contest tonight–I assume it’s from an earlier performance. You can get a sense of the weirdness nonetheless:
UPDATE #2: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Serbia’s answer to kd lang wins? And the mad, mad Ukraine comes in second? I call block (or is that bloc?) judging.
We’re doing some work with Porto Cupecoy, a luxury ‘marina village’ resort on St. Martin in the Caribbean. Well, technically it’s on Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the island.
The folks from 
